NASA Study: Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed 295
submitter bigwheel sends this excerpt from a NASA news release:
The cold waters of Earth's deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself. "The sea level is still rising," Willis noted. "We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."
phase change (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:phase change (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of Ice melting. Could be that all the energy is going into phase change right now.
No. Your statement is false. It could only be true if you stated that ice melting is severely underestimated. This stuff is not ignored, you know. It's hell of a lot of energy to change ice to water at 0C. That's why polar ice caps are called air conditioning of the world.
For comparison, it's almost easier to boil water than to melt it from 0C ice to 0C water.
* 334kJ/kg for water to melt it
* 418kJ/kg for water to raise from 0C to 100C
Basically the energy required to melt ice is the same as to raise the temperature of water from 0 to 80C.
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... it's almost easier to boil water than to melt it from 0C ice to 0C water.
Your statement would be true if you'd left out the word boil and simply said "raise it's temperature from 0C to 100C". The heat of vaporization of water [wikipedia.org] is a whopping 2260 kJ/Kg - that's the heat required to turn 100C water into 100C steam.
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"Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down"
What this study found was that melting ice and warming of the first 2000 meters accounted for virtually all of the sea level rise. Nice bit of editorializing on the part of bigwheel to suggest that this new data has any impact on "why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years." This does not suggest that the ocean has warmed less than we had previously thought. Only that the warming is occurring primarily in the first 2 kilometers of depth.
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Typical liberal. They're all tolerance and diversity and kumbaya and shit unless they disagree with you and then it's "I hope you die".
Re:phase change (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's not a constructive attitude to take. But, if I'm convinced that global warming is going to wipe out the human race, then anyone who is arguing on the other side is directly contributing to the extermination of humanity, and that's not going to endear me to them. And in a broader sense regarding "liberals", tolerant people can't be expected to be tolerant of intolerance. Same with religion - if I'm convinced that anyone not worshipping God is helping the devil to destroy the world, then I'm not really going to be sympathetic to atheists or other religions. Of course to someone who disagrees with me on any of these positions, I'm just some nutjob. But if I'm right, well, what otherwise outrageous actions are acceptable in order to save the world?
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Your belief, does not give you a right to be intolerant towards others.
Your beliefs do not make you righteous, no matter what they are.
They are beliefs.
Your comparison to religion is apt. as you make the point of those that state AGW and the CC movement is more akin to a religious movement and dogma than it is to actual science.
If you have a little patience, read the following recent link, to get a good grasp of how Science and peer review have been redefined by the climate movement and why.
Also about the "
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I deliberately chose extreme examples, and I deliberately chose one example that I have sympathy with (that AGW presents a threat to the western way of life) and one that I do not (that there is a god).
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we get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Climate: (noun) - anything in the sky or seas that can be twisted to support the claims that the world will end if we do not all pay higher taxes and give governments more power over individuals.
Weather: (noun) - anything in the sky or seas that might be twisted into an argument that governments do not need more money and power in order to "save the planet"
Examples of proper usage:
1. Hurricanes: when large and devastating, like Katrina, they are climate and proof of global warming, but when absent for a record-setting period of time they become weather and anybody who cites them as evidence of non-warming is an IDIOT
2. Temperatures: when high in a place like California, they are climate and proof of global warming, but when very low in a place like the midwest and explained as a "polar vortex" they are just weather and anybody claiming temperatures matter is an IDIOT who doesn not "get" the difference between "climate" and "weather"
3. Droughts: When hitting California worse than younger citizens remember in their short lives they are climate and proof of global warming, but when people are reminded that they have happened many times before and when evidence shows that the current one too is tied to El Nino/La Nina weather patterns they are....... um...... still climate and proof the world will end if we do not abandon the free market, personal liberty, etc (when something is a disaster that can be used no matter what, it remains climate)
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Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, yes.
Causing warmer temperatures, still not proven to the extent the models claim.
Warmer temperatures causing economic losses, there is nothing to demonstrate that is true.
We have no losses to cut, yet. However going towards carbon trading schemes will definitely generate losses for the population and society as a whole.
If you have a little patience, read the following recent link, to get a good grasp of how Science and peer review have been redefined by the climate moveme
Re:we get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You know.....
This story is a legitimate chance for anti-GWers to crow a little bit. (sort of). We have something here, by a reputable source (NASA) that has revealed a tough question. We thought the deep ocean was warming. It turns out it isn't. We were using that as a sink for the heat to explain the recent pause in the global warming. Shit... This makes us search for some answers.
This is science working. It's also NASA saying "hey, wait a minute", which You People always seem to say never happens. It's also STILL saying that the oceans are warming, just not the deep oceans. It also says the deep oceans are REALLY hard to measure, so perhaps it's wrong. We'll see.
So, yeah, Anti-GWers, this was your moment to shine. This was your moment to crow. Instead CppDeveloper decided to make an ignorant comment about CO2 being plant food. Yes. We knew that. Thanks. You're about 20 years behind on your Stupid Anti-GWing statements. We know CO2 is plant food. We know plants absorb it. That's kind of the point of oil. It's a nicely balanced system and we have been A. releasing millions of years of Stored In Plants CO2 inside 200 years and B. cutting down rain forest for beef farms at the same time. We've hashed out your stupid statement years ago. You need to update...
Grumble.....
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Nah, I am pointing out that it IS about politics and taxes.
Re: we get it (Score:2)
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This is science working. It's also NASA saying "hey, wait a minute", which You People always seem to say never happens. It's also STILL saying that the oceans are warming, just not the deep oceans. It also says the deep oceans are REALLY hard to measure, so perhaps it's wrong. We'll see.
To be fair, James Hansen is no longer at NASA.
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Might be nice if as well as searching for some answers, you would also search to see if you're asking the right questions.
Re:we get it (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that carbon dioxide is quite literally PLANT FOOD, don't you?
Yeah, but there's not much we can do about that. "People breathe, therefore it's ok to dump another half trillion tons of carbon out of the ground into the atmosphere" isn't really a convinving argument.
You do realize that carbon dioxide is quite literally PLANT FOOD, don't you?
Yes. Sure. Maybe some of that trillion tons (the half trillion we already liberated, and the other half trillion that's following on rapildy) will be absorbed by plant life. After all, it was plant life that it came from. Maybe if we take the carbon that had been captured by plants and stored over hundreds of millions of years as fossil fuels, and release it into the atmosphere in a few decades, maybe plant life will be able to keep up with that. Or maybe not.
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You do realize that carbon dioxide is quite literally PLANT FOOD, don't you?
Water is also plant food, so by the same logic, you wouldn't mind if your house was flooded ?
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You do realise that every time you post something like that, the only thing you achieve is letting people see you really have no idea what you're going on about. Let's try this again:
Climate: (noun) - the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period
Weather: (noun) - the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time as regards heat, cloudiness, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc.
Please let your strawman go and actually attack the science, if it's that easy. Apparently
Re:we get it (Score:5, Informative)
ignorant AC mdoded insightful by ignorant mods.
Again, I'll break it down Barney style for you:
-Weather is what's outside your window. Local, and immediate observation.
-Climate is a whole bunch of those local observations, from a whole bunch of locations. IE, an average or trend.
Keep your eye on the man, not the dog (Cosmos clip):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
1) The part of hurricanes most clearly linked to climate change is the season: it's been starting earlier, and lasting longer. No one really understands why this year was mild year for hurricanes, but agian: one year doesnt invalidate previous decades of observation. Next year could be the worst year ever. Or it could be mild too. Either way it will provide another data point, more observations, that can be applied and explored. And keep in mind that hurricanes, due their ginormous size and the amount of energy they contain, themselves cause changes in weather and climate over a tremendously large region.
2) Question: what caused the polar vortex to break its normal bounds and allow an unusal blast of arctic air to move southward into New England, while also allowing warm tropical air to come raging northward and cause a winter heat wave in Alaska? Could it have been the increased instabilty of the climate caused by dumping ever increasing amounts of energy into the system?
3) No, this level of drought has not occured in Calfornia before in recent history. Its not just young people who never experienced something like it before...neither have the old folks. No one who is currently alive was also alive during that last time California had such a severe drought. There is no evidence that its tied to El Nino considering that neither an El Nino nor La Nina event has occured during this drought. Fact of the matter that evidence is mounting that previous wetness of California is the anomaly, not the current dryness.
While this is not science that can be easily replicated in a lab in a short time frame so we can say "AHA! We have all the answers!", and will require millions of observations from around the globe over a tremendous time frame, the idea that you continually dump more and more energy into a system without affecting it is idiocy.
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Extraordinary climate change claims require extraordinary trolling to defend them.
Re:phase change (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to admit that you could've been wrong isn't it?
Especially after you've been gloating over your high horse position and have insulted everyone that disagreed.
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It's hard to admit that you could've been wrong isn't it?
Especially after you've been gloating over your high horse position and have insulted everyone that disagreed.
Hah! You think this one is bad? I have stories.
But it does seem to be true: the term "denier" is increasingly pointing in the other direction now.
Jane/Lonny Eachus goes Sky Dragon Slayer (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, I've repeatedly explained [slashdot.org] that the power needed to cool the walls is irrele
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That was my first instinct, but it's also possible that humanity just doesn't have THAT much of an impact. Remember that we're actually living in an unusually stable period of Earth's climate history to begin with, and as recent as the Cretaceous period we had atmospheric CO2 some 20 times what it is now (which BTW happened to be the most "green" period of Earth's history in addition to supporting the largest land animals to ever live.)
Who is to say when this period we're so familiar with ends, our fault or
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The continents were also in different positions, much closer together, which would have an affect on ocean circulation.
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This is going to sound really, really bizarre, but you could familiarise yourself with some of the most basic research, which would answer all of your questions. Believe it or not, but the climate scientists have taken historical events & trends into account when working on this. You also might want to be aware that in the Cretaceous period CO2 was at about 2000ppm, not the 8000ppm required to be 20x the current level.
So to answer your question - the research findings show that it is most definitely h
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Who is to say when this period we're so familiar with ends, our fault or not?
If and when it ends, it will end for reasons. There will be some set of physical processes that drive the cycle or rhythm or rollercoaster or whatever you want to call it. We're trying to figure out what those processes are, and we've discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be having a bad effect as far as our comfort is concerned. So, I guess, scientists will be those who say when it ends, if we let them figure it out, and right now most scientists are saying that too much CO2 is a bad thing. Sure,
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No, no we are not in an unsually unstable period of climate. Or more accurately stated, that instability is BECAUSE OF US.
And no, no you cannot dump ever increasing amounts of energy into a system without effect. We ARE having an effect.
To be clear: The human race dumps in excess of 40 BILLION tons of CO2 into the atmospehere, every year. To put that in perspective, that's the weight of 400,000 aircraft carriers. If formed into a cube, it's a cube 95,000 feet tall.
You say "but the dinosaurs were fine"...to
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Yes, it's true! A top expert says the Arctic could be ice free by 2010! [canada.com]
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Could be free as soon as 2010 or 2015, as against the 2050 that the IPCC had forecast. Sure, it's not as bad as the very very worst possibility that one expert has warned. We're not out of the woods yet.
This is how science happens. You study, you theorise, you predict, you measure, you GOTO 10. If you don't publish your predicitons, then nobody learns and science cannot progress, especially in a long term field like climatology. We may well not know what the truth is behind CO2 and AGW until well past my li
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Conspiracy (Score:2)
Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
They're obviously getting a rebate on rocket fuel from big oil. Deniers the whole bunch of them!
Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:3, Interesting)
Because that is what every new report is field of science that we don't actually understand.
And we don't. As regards global climate we have models and data but we don't really understand what is going on here. We never have. And that isn't to say that AGW isn't happening or is or anything one way or the other. But rather that it is extremely complicated and extremely confusing.
This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated just like the walrus thing made the pro AGW people feel vindicated. It is going to go back and forth. I'm sure tomorrow or the next day we'll get another report of something that backs up the AGW side and this article will just be forgotten.
That is just the politics. For those of us that don't care about the politics... this should just be interesting.
So what we get here is that the heat predicted by the models is still missing.
That is interesting. So we should keep looking for it. And until it is found those supporting the climate models that require that heat to be somewhere really should be some what humble about their position until the heat is found. Which is reasonable. But assuming they don't want to do that for whatever reason... Whatever. We're going to respond to this issue however makes best sense to each of us.
For me... I'm going to take with a grain of salt anything someone says when they don't show what I feel to be a reasonable amount of humility on an issue they cannot claim to fully understand. By all means... form your own opinions.
For me... this is just another interesting data point. I await more.
Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Interesting)
"This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated"
They shouldn't. The alternative explainations as to where that energy is going are far more concerning. If the energy is not being disipated into the deeper oceans, then its being concentrated elsewhere. Candidates include: Siberian traps. Arctic/Antarctic pole melt. Upper ocean (And thats an "oh shit" possibility), and so on.
Null hypothesis (Score:2)
No extra heat needs to be found because the earth is not warming any more than usual during the latter stages of an inter-glacial. Seems to fit the observed phenomenon.
Alternate explanation is that not all feedbacks are positive and the plant food that has been modeled to cause AGW is just a bit player. That also seems to fit the observed behavior as CO2 continues to rise but global temps have plateaued.
We can leave the door open to the 'oh shit' possibilities, but really, that's starting to feel shril
Re:Null hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)
Except global temperatures have not plateaued and continue to rise. The rate of the rise changes but it is continuing to rise. The "plateau" is only spin using a very crude line from a peak in 1998. http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]
The warming cannot be explained by an inter-glacial. Dumping millions of years of stored carbon into the upper atmosphere is not surprisingly having an effect on the climate. Land use changes, clear felling, road and city concreting do not help either.
This study is going to help refine the calculations of where heat is stored and how it changes over time but don't delude yourself that this is not related to human activity. Even most deniers have stopped denying that.
Re:Null hypothesis (Score:4, Funny)
Bingo. Anti-AGW people go "ah hah! It's not warming see! Nothing to worry about!"
Which should actually be about as comforting as discovering that your septic tank has gone from full to empty without any actually needing to pump it out.
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I believe that climate modelers have identified over a thousand feedbacks, many positive, many negative. The problem is that this really and truly the great unknown of climate models -- The early models (and probably later ones, since the results are somewhat consistent in overall sensitivity) pretty much all seem to be have estimated sensitivity to the CO2 as much larger than unity. From radiation emissivity calculation alone, a doubling of CO2 should raise average temp. by 1.1 def C, the earlier climate m
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No extra heat needs to be found because the earth is not warming any more than usual during the latter stages of an inter-glacial.
Not only is this a lie (covered in a sibling comment) but you are just completely ignoring known physics. Carbon release has predictable consequences, and there are no carbon releases of this magnitude in Earth's history since the last great extinction.
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You completely missed the point of hte article.
The oceans ARE absorbing heat. More of it than we expected. That is not in debate, and not being challenged by the article.
All this article is saying is that the heat/energy isnt also making it into the deepest depths. Which is not exactly shocking.
The fact that the ocean has different layers that do not (relatively) mix is not new. These differening layers are well known.
Which means its being concentrated in the upper portions of the ocean, namely the layers t
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So far we can conclude that it is not in the upper atmosphere, it is not in the lower atmosphere, it is not on land surfaces and not on the ocean surface. Now we have an additional data point, it is not in the lower oceans and the ice caps are low but a slow positive trend. These last two decades have seen runaway CO2 emissions but no noticeable warming. Few people claim that high CO2 levels are a good thing, but as GP stated, we are far from understanding climate.
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You are correct, the effect, without feedback mechanisms that is, is well understood. When going from 300ppm to 600ppm the average temperatures should rise around 1C. So how did the climate scientists come to the 4C figure or the current IPCC figure of 2C? Assuming that these figures are correct, the exact feedback mechanisms that lead to these figures are not understood.
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Explain the Carboniferous. Our CO2 levels are only now matching the Permian [biocab.org]. Everywhere else in the time line was higher to much higher.
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They shouldn't. The alternative explainations as to where that energy is going are far more concerning. If the energy is not being disipated into the deeper oceans, then its being concentrated elsewhere. Candidates include: Siberian traps. Arctic/Antarctic pole melt. Upper ocean (And thats an "oh shit" possibility), and so on.
No, because we aren't actually observing any of those things. Antarctic ice recently set a historic record. And not just sea ice, either. Satellite data has been showing the land volume to be growing too. Arctic is is pretty darned normal. (Not quite at the 1981-2010 average, but pretty damned close.)
If the "missing" energy were in the upper ocean we would have known about it long ago, because we've been keeping upper ocean temperature records for decades.
Deep ocean was pretty much the last gasp for t
Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Informative)
Are you sure about that? People usually say the sea ice is increasing in extent, but that the land ice (the bit that might raise sea levels) is shrinking rapidly. For example:
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/ [nasa.gov]
Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveals that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too.
/. had a recent story on this too, based on data from the same satellite:
http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/30/2351213/antarctic-ice-loss-big-enough-to-cause-measurable-shift-in-earths-gravity [slashdot.org]
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I dislike replying to trolls. But for the record and anyone who might actually buy your bullshit, your statements should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
The Antarctic ice maximum is SEA ice, just a thin sheet a meter or two thick, consistent with higher winds (guess why- increased thermal gradients) leaving source water exposed to the atmosphere.
At the same time GIGATONS of LAND ice (the kind which raises sea level) is being lost in the Antarctic and even faster in Greenland.
Land volume growing? I know
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I appreciate the effort, but it is pointless I'm afraid. I'm assuming that these folks actually mean well, in the sense that they genuinely believe that 97% of climate scientists are involved in some harebrained conspiracy ("green is the new red"). My point is that once that idea is firmly lodged into someone's mind, no amount of links to actual science is going to change their opinion. If anything, it'll just reaffirm it.
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No, because we aren't actually observing any of those things. Antarctic ice recently set a historic record.
I refer to you my earlier comment [slashdot.org], which you personify. HTH, HAND.
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Oh my god...the antarctic sea ice saw a maximum...during winter...after being inundated with record amounts of freshwater, which freezes easier and at a warmer temperature, from the melting antarctic land ice (a volume of melted ice the size of Manhattan, and 3 miles thick)....shocking.
Just stop posting. You are wrong every single time.
You repeat the same debunked myths, every single time.
You completely missed the point of hte article.
The oceans ARE absorbing heat. More of it than we expected. That is not i
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That assumes it is being trapped in the earth at all. Until you find out where it went, you can't say it is on earth at all. It could have been bounced back into space for all you know.
I am NOT saying it was bounced back into space. I am saying you need to find it before you can say it is still in the planet. You cannot merely assume with scientific authority that it is here. You would need empirical evidence of that point to hold that position. Absent knowing where the heat went you don't have that. Which
Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:5, Interesting)
From an intellectual standpoint, I agree with you.
From a real-world standpoint, the problem of the political response in terms of adaptations and mitigations isn't going anywhere and means that almost nobody will do what you suggest. You may not care about the politics, but in practical terms, they are probably the most important thing. With a range of responses in the public debate from "do nothing" at one extreme to "throw away Western civilisation, start living in organic yurts spending our evenings knitting underwear out of hemp" at the other, there's a lot of emotion and political capital invested in this debate. It's only made worse by the number of people who have latched onto the issue as a means to push almost-entirely-unrelated political agendas, mostly far-left, but a few far-right as well.
So in practical terms, this report provides a touch of ammunition to the "do nothing" camp and has the potential to slide opinion slightly in their direction. But, as you say, this time tomorrow, the position may well be reversed and the "organic yurtists" may hold the advantage.
And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.
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Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Informative)
Except that the "throw away Western civilization" is only ever thrown out there by the "do nothing" crowd as a caricature of progressive proposals. That said, there is ample precedence for the concept of you break it you pay for it, so some wealth redistribution is going to be a factor in most reasonable strategies.
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Because personal freedoms, including the freedom to pursue "wants" as well as "needs" are kind of a cornerstone of Western civilisation.
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Having missed that story, it seems to center around a calculation of needed energy if the whole planet displayed circa-2010 American consumption within two decades. That is, as far as I can tell at a glance, without accounting for improved efficiency of power generation, storage, distribution, and use.
Setting aside the question of whether the rest of the planet actually aspires to US consumption patterns (which I think are widely perceived as unnecessarily wasteful) the submission you linked to says
Economists and energy experts shy away from issues of equity and morality, but climate change and environmental justice are inseparable: It's impossible to talk intelligently about climate without discussing how to distribute limited energy resources.
Which se
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I heard yesterday on CSPAN a debate between the two senatorial contenders in Colorado. It wasn't an uplifting experience. However, when the debate came to climate change. The Democrat said the usual things you'd expect a Democrat to say. The Republican started by expressing his concern for the environment but that when it came down to economics, he'd be choosing economics over the environment. So the boy clearly sees no link between the state of the environment and the state of the economy, a point the Demo
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And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.
Well...just how often do scientists need to say "the scientific method compels us to observe, collect and analyze data, and revise our theories when those observations and data require us to do so"? Revising theories, refining our understanding, and being intellectually, is not humility. It's part of the scientific process. The deniers have other motivations.
NASA? (Score:2)
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Shouldn't the oceans fall under the NOAA's domain?
NASA has a mandate to figure out what's with a variety of planets throughout the universe. They only have a few samples nearby, and this is the only one they can measure REALLY thoroughly, to test and refine their models and theories.
They also have the technology to do measurements from space. AND they work closely with NOAA (including launching and operating observation satellites for them).
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Not that I'm bothered by NASA, but I hate when the science is turned political instead of being....you know...science. And James Hansen tends to do that.
It's like troposphere/stratosphere but upside down (Score:5, Informative)
In the atmosphere there's a situation: The weather all happens down near the surface, in a region called the troposphere. Here the density/temperature gradients can result in instabilities, where a parcel of air that is, say, lighter than its sourroundings can become MORE ligher-than-its surroundings as it moves up (and vice-versa). Above that is another (set of) layer(s) called the "stratosphere", where everything is most stable right where it is. Nothing very exciting happens there except when something coming up REALLY fast from below coasts up a bit before it stabilizes and moves back down.
The oceans do something similar, but upside down:
Water has an interesting property: Like most materials it gets more dense as it gtss colder - but only up to a point. As it approaches freezing the molecules start hanging out in larger groups, working their way toward being ice crystals. The hydrogens on one molecule attract the oxygens on another, and because of the angle between the hydrogens bondended to the oxygen in each molecule, the complexes are somewhat LESS dense than liquid. As a result, with progressively lower temperatures the density reaches a maximum, then the water begins to expand again. When it actually freezes it is so much less dense than near-freezing liquid that the ice floats. With fresh water the maximum density happens about 4 degrees C. Salt disrupts the crystalization somewhat so the maximum density is a tad cooler (and varies a bit with salt concentration - and thus depth), but the behavior is similar.
The result is that, when you have a mix of cooler and hotter blobs of fresh water, the water closer to 4 degrees sinks and that farther from it rises. The result is that, absent a heat or impurity source below, the bottom (and much of the volume) of a deep lake tends to be stable, stratified, water at about 4 degrees year around, while all the deviations from it and "weather" activity is in no more than about the top 300 feet: Wave action, ice, hot and cold currents, etc. are all above the reasonably abrupt "thermocline" boundary. Below that things are very slow, driven mostly by things like volcanic heat. (Diffusion is REALLY slow in calm water. It takes decades for, say, dissolved impurities to move a couple inches.)
The ocean is much like that, too, but a little cooler and with some temperature ramps spreading out the thermocline due to variations in salt concentration.
So global warming/cooling/weather, whatever would NOT be expected to affect deep water temperatures. This would all be happening in the top few hundred feet. If, say, the ocean were heating up without the surface water temperature changing, this would take the form of the thermocline gradually lowering near the equator and/or rising near the poles, rather than the deep water becoming warmer.
Please stop arguing and think like a scientist. (Score:2)
The Quest for an explanation must continue.
Hippie Spin (Score:2)
...disappears in a puff of logic (Score:2)
"leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years"
ROTFL
Why From 2005? (Score:2)
Re:Yesterday Oceans were warming more than predict (Score:4, Insightful)
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The article from the other day was quite clearly talking about the upper waters.
This one is quite clearly talking about much deeper waters.
You got that right! It's a wonderful thing and the way they measured this using gravitational anomalies viewed from space is a great testament to our progress as a species. We are documenting our destruction in unprecedented detail.
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Looking at the WikiPedia chart, there have been down and flat periods in the past, such as the early 1990's. The bumpiness is on about 10 year cycles or spans. The latest "pause" does not appear outside of that pattern, at least not yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thermal capacity of rock? (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that the transmission of heat would not be perfect and so if there were heat being sinked in the rock there should be residual heat in the water. The oceans are not after all super conductors. They must have a high resistance and that resistance would mean they would warm if they were subjected to a net increase in heat.
I am no expert either of course... so many that is all crap. :-)
It is very difficult to discuss this issue because about 30 percent of people only care about answers that prove AGW and end the discussion and another 30 percent of people only care about answers that disprove AGW and end the discussion. That means about 60 percent want AGW to not be talked about but rather concluded one way or the other. That leaves less then 40 percent that are actually curious about it and want to know more.
This makes posing questions and looking into the issue problematic because the 60 percent will attempt to shut down any discussion one way or the other. Those 30 percent figure are of course completely pulled out of my butt and they will shift around radically from one moment to the next. In some cases, I've been pretty sure it was over 90 percent of people in a discussion that simply didn't want anyone to talk about the issue at all. Just hordes of people shouting and browbeating everyone to try and silence everything.
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to either binary perspective on AGW.
you may. BUT. you should also keep the system as it is before deciding to act on AGW or not.
keeping the system as it is means : stop burning fossil fuels.
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By all means yes. But let's switch to 4th generation nuclear (and work on fusion in background), rather than hippy tree-hugging solutions like wind and solar.
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Until recently, solar panels used more energy to produce than they were providing. They make perfect sense for moving energy producing into isolated places (sattelites, middle-of-nowhere lamps/lights, autonomous devices etc etc) - but they were not a solution for getting rid of coal. Still, 'tree hugging hippies' were pushing them as a solution to everything even tens of years ago, without doing any cost/benefit analysis. Not to mention my friends putting them on roof of their houses in north of Germany to
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Political factions only care about the binary perspective because the only thing that matters to them is "US" or "THEM".
That's all they care about. It is a pissing contest between the factions. The science isn't especially relevant to either of them from what I can see. If the AGW issue were proved to be a non-issue scientifically a significant portion of the pro AGW lobby would still push it even though it were concluded. By the same token, the anti AGW lobby would still fight against AGW issues even if it
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It is precisely that attitude, which is found on BOTH sides, which makes it very hard to actually discuss the issue.
You're part of the problem. ;-)
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Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?
Without getting technical, heat capacity is called "specific heat", and water has a relatively high specific heat. Using similar units, here are some examples:
Granite: 0.79
Basalt: 0.84
Sea Water: 3.93
So the heat "storage" capacity of liquid water is, very roughly, about 4.8 times that of rock.
Also just a phase change, from ice to water or vice versa at the same temperature, requires (or releases) a surprisingly large amount of energy.
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It is not really an issue of thermal capacity. The huge difference is that solid materials like rock, silt, etc. do not have convection currents (or other forms of mixing). Heat transfer via conduction alone is very much lower. If the oceans were magically raised by 1 degree overnight, it would take months to years to warm the underlying floor by half a degree 5 meters below its surface (depending upon the material)
Water has a higher heat capacity compared to just about everything else when considered on a
Re:Thermal capacity of rock? (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?
You are correct to label your question naive :-)
The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, so the depth being looked at here (just under 2000 m) isn't typically in contact with rock at all. That is, if you demarcated the 2000 m depth line it would intersect very little ocean floor, and that just off the edges of continental shelves. These are pretty much the "mid-depths" we are talking about.
Furthermore, rock is both a) insulating (compared to water) and b) of relatively low heat capacity (compared to water).
Water has a heat capacity of about 4 kJ/kg*K, which is to day it takes 4 kJ to raise 1 kg of water 1 K in temperature. A typical rock (granite, say, although most others are similar) has a heat capacity of 0.8 kJ/kg*K, so rock is both less able to transport heat and less able to absorb heat than water.
Oceans are far more important to the heat balance of the Earth than the air is. Consider the scales. Earth has 5E18 kg of air, and 1.4E21 kg water, and water has 4 times the heat capacity of air, so the thermal mass of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than that of the air (I'm actually surprised it's not more than that, but I've confirmed the numbers from a couple of different sources.)
Given that AGW is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget, consider a typical square metre of ocean surface, below which is a water column 4000 m deep with a mass of 4E6 kg. That 1.6E-3 kJ/s*m**2 has the capacity to raise the temperature of that water column by 1.6E-3/4*4E6 = 1E-9 K/s. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize there are 3.14E7 s/year, so ocean warming, all else being equal, could be as much as 0.03 K/year, or 0.3 K/decade, or 3 K/century.
These are pretty appreciable numbers, and give a sense of the utility of precise ocean measurements as a way of getting at AGW, because we should be able to see a characteristic depth profile of temperature developing over time that would allow us to infer the additional radiative forcing very directly.
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that is the intrinsic property of specific heat capacity, isn't the extrinsic property more important here as we are talking about specific amounts of things? Rocks have >25% (2-3 times?) density of wat
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Call me naive too, but I'm not convinced that there's a net downward movement of energy in the oceans. I'd say that the seabed overall is probably warmer than the cold water directly above it, so there should be a resulting upward transfer of energy.
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mid depths. furthermore, the crust is warmer than the water anyways at those depths?
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So, scientists say "Earth is warming but we can't find the few percent of excess heat expected".
Deniers "Proof there is global cooling!! Alarmists showed wrong!"
If this was about gravity it would go, "There needs to be Dark Matter and Dark Energy to explain some of the things we observe at large distances"
Gravity deniers would say "Proof that Earth is Flat! Gravity does not exist! It's a push, not a pull! The spaghetti monster is touching us all! Scientists can't explain it!"
So why are flat earthers laughed out and AGW deniers not? Perhaps it has to do with our inability, as a society, to actually plan for the future. We live in this la-la world of "Whatever will be, will be. The future is not for us to see". Maybe we can't plan for the future after all and just need to die off like bacteria in a Petri dish, dying in their own shit.
I find that hilarious because cosmology is so close to religion it's getting hard to tell the difference. 40 years of people insisting things were black holes and now they don't happen.
http://uncnews.unc.edu/2014/09... [unc.edu]
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Whoa... Yet another one that simply doesn't get science at all.
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A lot of the risk mitigation is not really that expensive. Isolating buildings properly to require less heating and cooling is often a good investment anyway. Solar and wind energy are roughly competitive nowadays so why not encourage people to use it? Investing in public transport is wise for many other reasons than just CO2 emissions, and so on. Investing some public money in research for alternative energy is not that expensive either. One or two dollars/euros (or the equivalent in the local currency) pe
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